More from Books

Thursday

Jason Goodwin

Spirit of the wild water

I was sheltering in the dunes on a Hebridean beach, reading this book, when I happened to glance up and see an otter galumphing out of the machair and down onto the sand, 20 yards off. Long, hump-backed and shiny, it was the first wild otter I had ever seen. Such is the talismanic power of this book that I suppose Miriam Darlington must have summoned him for me. Here she is, evoking her own first encounter: I get a flash of the bristling vibrissae, the otter’s extravagant whiskers, and in a split second he catches my scent. He runs and makes a direct gallop for the shoreline. He moves quickly, but with the lumbering gait that, I learn later, otters always have on land.

Thursday

Mark Mason

Knowing your onions

Having fried your leeks in butter, form them into a poultice and apply it to your backside. No, not Heston Blumenthal’s latest wheeze: instead the cure for piles advocated by William Buchan, 18th-century author of Domestic Medicine, now republished as Can Onions Cure Ear-ache? (Bodleian Library, £14.99). The new title gives you a clue to Buchan’s general style (poultice again). He also recommended holding burns near a fire and rubbing salt on them, while mere bruising called for the application of cow dung. Gonorrhoea (‘the fruit of unlawful embraces’) could be defeated by rubbing mercury on the inner thigh.

Ben Hamilton

A way to somewhere else

Since his suicide in 2008 at the age of 46, David Foster Wallace’s influence on contemporary literature has expanded to the point where even writers who haven’t read him struggle to keep out of his shadow. Traces of his style can be found every time a young writer uses a compound conjunction, or a comically extended footnote. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, the first biography of Wallace, has the difficult task of chronicling his life and work while we are still coming to terms with their impact. Born in the American Midwest to liberal and academic parents (the kind who read Ulysses to each other before bed and tolerated their teenage son’s pot-smoking), Wallace was unusually clever from the start. D.T.

John Martin-Robinson

A Charlotte Brontë of wood and stone

Sarah Losh is not forgotten (as the subtitle of this book suggests) in her own village of Wreay (pronounced ‘Rear’), south east of Carlisle in Cumberland. The locals refer to ‘Miss Sarah’ as if she were still alive, rather as they speak about Lady Anne Clifford at Appleby. Anybody who has visited the village and seen the extraordinary church built in 1841-2 by Miss Losh at her own expense will know why. Travellers are met with the apparition of a small Roman basilica stranded on a village green, embellished with mind-blowing carvings. They are partly inspired by fossils, obscure natural history specimens and esoteric symbols. The Losh graves in the churchyard are strikingly odd and personal too.

Philip Hancock

Martini Man

Blondes, brunettes, ginger nuts, I’ve had ’em all, sunshine. Could be Janet the cleaner or that Irish cook at the day nursery. A dead cert’s Aunty Pat. What Aunty Pat? His wife puts two and two together. But in the back of his minivan? Unsnaring her heel from his bosun’s chair, ruining her Wolford’s on a gripper rod. From a dust sheet, wood slivers and flecks of paint adhere to her pasty arse, her perfume made nameless by linseed. He lies back thinking of cricket bats and summer fences. Tells her how it works for kneading old putty: softening it up, bringing it to life. Got to look after your hands: the golden rule for any tradesman.

Andrew Taylor

A choice of crime novels | 6 September 2012

Broken Harbour (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99) is Tana French’s fourth novel in a series based around Dublin’s murder squad. Despite the format, she rings the changes by using a different lead character in each book. Here it’s a detective named ‘Scorcher’ Kennedy, a man who chases murderers with a monastic sense of vocation and a chilly self-awareness. The story opens when a seemingly perfect family becomes the victim of a murderous attack at their home. The two young children are smothered; the parents are stabbed in the course of a bloody fight in the kitchen that leaves the father dead and the mother wounded, perhaps fatally. The victims’ home is in Brianstown, a half-built coastal resort that fell victim to the Irish recession.

Anthony Cummins

A red rag, or just bull?

Howard Jacobson’s new novel is a satire on modern literary publishing seen through the eyes of a writer, Guy, who wants to sleep with his mother-in-law even though he’s married to a stunner famed for her casseroles and ‘street blow jobs’ (that’s what it says). Things happen in it not to feed the story but to feed punchlines: Guy’s agent dies backpacking in the Hindu Kush only so Jacobson can say that ‘a literary agent going missing was too common an occurrence to attract speculation’. The gag is typical for the sense of moral and aesthetic collateral damage left in its wake. Overstatement is key to Jacobson’s style, as if he might become a comic writer simply by being a writer you can’t take seriously.

Alan Judd

The English inquisition

Early on in this fascinating history Stephen Alford makes an important point: because Elizabeth I and the settlement between monarchy, church and state survived, because the threat of foreign invasion was thwarted or failed to materialise, and because the sense of national identity fostered by the Tudors proved robust, we see that first Elizabethan age as a confident and assured success story. But to those involved it was far more precarious, with victory anything but assured and survival a daily challenge. Alford dramatises this by imagining Elizabeth’s assassination in St James’s Park, followed by invasion by the superpower, Spain.

John Sutherland

Bloomsbury’s twin powerhouses

Rosemary Ashton has always been fascinated by the ways in which ideas ‘materialise’. Her first book, The German Idea, tracked the subtle filaments of Germanism in 19th-century British culture. In this, her latest book, she anatomises an area of London where more formative ideas have been conceived, and brought to fruition, than in any other of the metropolitan villages. Covent Garden is theatrical (and, bits of it, louche), Soho is bohemian (even more louche), Kensington is a home to science. In Bloomsbury it is the ‘march of mind’ that gives WC1 its distinctive character. Ashton sees Bloomsbury as a constellation of ‘progressive institutions’ — intellectual structures which have been as formative for Britain as the Revolution was for France.

Andro Linklater

Selective vision

In 1904, the great Halford Mackinder, founder of the modern academic discipline of geography, published one of the most subversive maps of the century. It might seem unlikely that a scientific representation of the physical world projected according to mathematical principles onto a two-dimensional surface could mess with your head, but that is the unmistakable conclusion of Professor Jerry Brotton’s exhilarating book.

Adam Nicolson

A chronicle of brutality

In the 1820s and 30s, London used about 20 million goose quills a year. The government’s Stationery Office on its own was still getting through half a million a year in the 1890s, roughly a quill a clerk a day. The administration of Victorian Britain and its global empire rested on a vast flock of geese. So fierce was the demand for quills that many were pulled from living birds, a process that was agonising and sometimes fatal. Travellers in rural England occasionally found denuded goose bodies lying quill-less at the side of the road where the quill robbers had left them shocked to death. Only the invention of the type-writer released the goose population of Britain from centuries of pain.

Saturday

Cressida Connolly

Are You My Mother, by Alison Bechdel

Alison Bechdel’s first book, Fun Home, enjoyed great acclaim: a memoir presented in comic-strip form, it described her father’s suicide and hidden homosexuality, her childhood visits to the family funeral home and Bechdel’s dawning realisation of her own lesbianism. The comic book does not immediately suggest itself as the ideal format for material of such intimacy and intermittent gruesomeness, but it worked. The dark humour of Charles Addams subverted the misery-memoir: Fun Home was hilarious, fascinating and very clever. Are You My Mother? is made from less gothic material. Where its predecessor brilliantly and unexpectedly wove Proust into the narrative, the current volume quotes a lot from Virginia Woolf and Freud.

Wynn Wheldon

The Heart Broke In, by James Meek

This is a big juicy slab of a book, as thrilling and nourishing as a Victorian three-parter.  It resembles its forebears thematically, too.  It asks a straightforward question: how does one know how to do the right thing when there is no moral foundation for our actions?  Where the Victorians had a forthright Christianity, modern secularism has no such set of rules, and its absence means that our notions of right and wrong have to be more or less made up as we go along. This is particularly true for Richie Shepherd. Formerly lead singer of The Lazygods, and now the producer of a TV show celebrating teen mediocrity, Teen Make-over, he is almost comically able to rearrange his vices as virtues.

Richard Davenporthines

Philida, by André Brink

The location of Philida is a Cape farm which used to be named Zandvliet and is now the celebrated vineyard Solms Delta, owned jointly by Richard Astor and the eminent neuropsychologist Mark Solms. It was Solms who brought to André Brink the story on which the veteran South African novelist bases his 21st work of fiction, which has been longlisted for the Man Booker prize. The novel’s eponymous heroine is based on a real-life slave who in 1824-32 worked as a knitting-girl at Zandvliet, which then belonged to collateral ancestors of the author.

Robert Carver

Short Walks from Bogota, by Tom Feiling

Ten years ago a cartoon appeared in the Independent showing the New World Order — Bush and Blair peering at a distorted global map with only one entry for South America: over Colombia was written ‘Coke-snorting bolshie gorillas’. Back then the Farc guerrillas were on the edge of the capital Bogotá, the country had the world’s highest kidnap rate and ‘failed state’ was considered its next realistic destination. Then even the title of this book would have been ironic, as to walk anywhere was to risk mugging or murder. Tom Feiling, a British journalist and film-maker who has written a previous book on the cocaine trade, knew Colombia in the bad old days.

Jane Ridley

The Criminal Conversation of Mrs Norton, by Diane Atkinson

Caroline Norton seems an unlikely pioneer of women’s rights. Born in 1808, the granddaughter of the playwright Sheridan, she was a black-eyed beauty, a sharp-tongued socialite with a gift for writing. She matters today because she quarrelled with her husband and refused to put up and shut up. That quarrel is the subject of Diane Atkinson’s book.   Caroline and her two beautiful sisters were brought up in genteel poverty by their widowed mother in a grace-and-favour apartment at Hampton Court. Lack of money meant that when Caroline was 19 she was married off to the first eligible man who came along.  George Norton, her husband, was the younger brother and heir to a childless peer named Lord Grantley. George was neither so pretty nor so witty as Caroline.

Alan Bell

The Roxburghe Club, by Nicolas Barker

Book-collecting fraternities are far from uncommon, but none of them is the equal of their British progenitor, the Roxburghe Club, either in age or exclusivity.  This June the members celebrated its bicentenary, apparently in due style. At the inaugural dinner in 1812, 18 book-collectors, chaired by the Lord Spencer of the day, gathered to celebrate the sale at auction of the 3rd Duke of Roxburghe’s copy of a 1471 edition of Boccaccio, for which Lord Blandford had just paid £2,260, then a record price for a printed book. It was exceeded only in 1884, and meanwhile the antiquarian book market went through periods of despondency.

Martin Gayford

Caspar David Friedrich, by Johannes Grave

In October 1810, the poet and dramatist Heinrich von Kleist substantially rewrote a review submitted to a publication he edited, the Berliner Abendblätter. Indeed, as few editors would dare — even in those days — he transformed its tone from critical to positive. The subject was a landscape by Caspar David Friedrich, ‘The Monk by the Sea’ painted c. 1808-10, which was exhibited in Berlin. In the course of his remarks Kleist came up with a startling metaphor: This painting, with its two or three mysterious elements, lies there like the apocalypse ... and since, in its monotony and boundlessness, it has nothing, other than the frame, that might serve as a foreground, the feeling one has gazing at it is as though one’s eyelids had been cut away.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

Alexander Fiske-Harrison enjoys a ‘story slam’ at the Edinburgh Fringe

The Edinburgh Fringe is a place of youthful hopes, naive dreams and occasional flashes of genuine inspiration. Usually these turn out to be very much flashes in the pan. But not so last Friday night’s ‘story slam’ at the Southall: a contest of storytelling between writers, poets and ne’er-do-wells divided into two teams, representing their home cities of Edinburgh and Chicago. The idea grew out of the ‘poetry slam’ format, invented in Chicago in 1980s, which was itself the child — or rather, the polite third cousin — of the ‘rap battle’ wars of words, in which aspiring hip-hop performers would twist language, rhythm and rhyme into weapons to wound an opponent’s amour-propre.

Sam Leith

Sweet Tooth, by Ian McEwan

‘I’m trying to help you, Serena. You’re not listening. Let me put it another way. In this work the line between what people imagine and what’s actually the case can get very blurred. In fact that line is a big grey space, big enough to get lost in. You imagine things — and you can make them come true. The ghosts become real. Am I making sense?’ You can’t say the heroine of Ian McEwan’s latest novel wasn’t warned. Serena Frome is a clever, pretty young woman who led a sheltered childhood as the daughter of an Anglican bishop: ‘We grew up inside a walled garden, with all the pleasures and limitations that implies.